Don't Build an SLS

Why one of the most expensive design decisions in spaceflight is also the one shaping most of our lives.

By Peter Plötner. Aerospace engineer and Wayfinder Life Coach. More about Peter →

NASA's newest moon rocket flies with engines that first launched in 1982.

This is not a charming retro detail. It is one of the most expensive design decisions in the history of spaceflight. Each launch of the SLS rocket costs around four billion dollars. Each flight throws away about a billion dollars in legacy hardware that falls into the ocean and is never recovered.

How did we get here?

NASA didn't quite choose this. Congress mandated that the SLS rocket reuse parts from the old Space Shuttle program. The engines. The booster segments. They called it heritage hardware. The idea was to save money by using parts that already existed.

So NASA built a rocket around hardware they didn't pick, for a mission those parts were never designed for.

The result is beautiful from a distance. Painfully expensive up close. Built for a mission that isn't quite anyone's.

I think most of us build our lives the same way.

The heritage hardware in your life

You did not start your life with a blank sheet of paper.

Nobody does. By the time you were old enough to ask “what do I actually want?”, you already had parts installed. Your parents handed you some. School handed you more. Culture shipped a whole stack pre-loaded. Religion, if you had one, came with its own components. Your peers added a few. Your country added a few more.

By the time you sat down to design your life, you weren't designing. You were assembling.

Most of us never stop to ask whether the parts fit the mission.

We just keep building. We finish the degree because it would be a waste not to. We stay in the career because we have ten years invested. We chase the milestone because we've been chasing it so long that stopping feels like losing ourselves. We marry the kind of person we were told to marry. We measure success the way we were taught to measure it. We carry a definition of “a good life” that someone else wrote, in a different decade, for a different person.

It's heritage hardware. And it is making each launch of our life cost a billion dollars more than it needs to.

The tell

Here's how you know you're flying an SLS.

You have a goal you can't quite explain. Not really. You can describe it, but if a curious friend kept asking “but why?”, you would run out of answers around the third or fourth round.

You feel a vague heaviness about a major part of your life that you cannot name. Work. The house. The relationship. The plan for next year.

You are extremely good at adding things to your life. You are very bad at removing them. Each new addition is sold to you (often by you) as the thing that will finally make the rest work.

You spend money on optimization. New apps. New systems. New books. New courses. New planners. None of it sticks for long, because the underlying parts were never the right ones.

You feel busy in a way that does not feel meaningful. Productive in a way that doesn't feel useful.

You are flying. You are just flying something that was never built for where you are trying to go.

The blank sheet

The harder thing, and the better thing, is to start fresh.

Not throw your whole life away. Not quit your job tomorrow. But on a quiet morning, with a real piece of paper, ask:

If I were starting from nothing, what would I actually want here?

Not what would I add to what I already have. What would I start with.

This is uncomfortable. It is uncomfortable because most of us suspect, somewhere underneath, that some of the parts we are flying with would not make the cut. The career. The friendship. The version of ourselves we have been performing. The shape we have made our days take.

A blank sheet asks: would I choose this again, if I had never been handed it?

Some things will pass that test. They are yours, even if you didn't pick them at first. Keep them.

Some things won't. And that is the whole point of asking.

A smaller experiment

You don't have to redesign your whole life this week.

Pick one area. Just one. Your mornings. Your weekends. Your work. Your friendships. Your fitness. Your money.

Take a blank sheet of paper. Don't look at what you currently do. Don't start from your calendar. Don't start from your habits. Don't start from what you “should” do.

Just write what you would build there if nothing was already in the room.

Then compare it to what you actually have.

The gap is your heritage hardware. Some of it you can keep. Some of it you can quietly let fall into the ocean.

You will be surprised how much lighter the rocket gets.

Frequently asked questions

How is this different from your essay on Musk's five-step algorithm?

That one walks through the full process for redesigning a life from the ground up. This one is the first step done in isolation, on one area, with a blank sheet. If the algorithm is the engineering manual, this is the practice drill.

Isn't this just sunk-cost fallacy by another name?

Related, not the same. Sunk cost says past investment shouldn't drive decisions. Heritage hardware is more specific: parts you didn't pick are still shaping the mission. The fix isn't just “ignore what you spent.” It's “ask whether the parts you inherited fit the mission you actually want.”

What if my heritage hardware is actually serving me?

Then keep it. The blank sheet exercise isn't a tool for throwing things away. It's a tool for noticing which parts of your life would survive if you had to choose them again from scratch. Plenty of yours will. Some won't. The point is to have asked.

Where should I do the blank-sheet exercise?

On paper. Not on a screen. Not in your usual notebook with all your previous goals visible. A new sheet, a quiet morning, no distractions. The mind does this work better when it's not surrounded by what already exists.

How long does this take?

The first sit-down: thirty minutes. The honest answer: weeks. Not because the writing is hard, but because watching what you wrote and noticing what you do differently is what changes anything. Don't expect insight on the first morning. Expect to find out, slowly, which parts of your old design you stop defending.

This is a companion piece to Stop Optimizing Your Life. Start Specifying It. where I walk through the full five-step process I use to question life requirements. If this hit something for you, the Essential Self Diagnostic is fifteen questions that take sixty seconds. A quick way to see which of your life requirements are still serving you, and which are just loud.